At least 300,000 people in north-west China are short of drinking water because of unseasonably warm weather, which officials link to climate change. Parts of Shaanxi province face drought after January saw as little as 10% of average rainfall, state media say. Frozen lakes are melting and trees are blossoming in the capital Beijing as it experiences its warmest winter for 30 years, the China Daily reported.
[…] The country’s top meteorologist, Qin Dahe, said the recent dry and warm weather in northern China was related to global warming. […]

China is struggling to cope with its worst snowfall in decades, with officials warning of future food shortages as winter crops are wrecked.[…]Dozens are thought to have died as much of the country endures one of its harshest winters for half a century.

How many people died in the 2007 heatwave? Perhaps…zero.

(4) How about Shaanxi? Sadly, no space for it this year on the BBC (at least, so far). Here’s what is happening though:rediff – January 30, 2008
“Snowstorms paralyse China”

This is the fourth posting in a series analyzing the information that can be obtained from the available HadCRUT data, recently updated to December 2007.

As in the previous blogs, the focus is on rank analysis, since it is widely claimed that global warming can be discerned by the fact that most of the warmest years have occurred very recently.

It is actually possible to obtain a rough indication on what is behind the recorded warming in the HadCRUT data by going one step below the usual globe-averaged, year-averaged figures.

(a) A strong hemispheric component is already visible in the yearly averages of the month-by-month ranks:

Note how for example SST/Southern-hemisphere is much more similar to Land/Southern-Hemisphere than to SST/Northern-hemisphere.

(b) Similar considerations apply at a seasonal level. See the graphs for the January-March period:

Obviously the Jan-Mar period is Southern Summer and Northern Winter. Let’s have a look at the Summer-to-Summer plots then:

I have computed the same graphs for all quarters, and for all seasons.

(c) It always looks more important to be in the same hemisphere, rather than in the same season or the same surface.

But visual inspection may be misleading, so a good round of correlations is in order (for the sake of clarity, the full list is at the end of this entry). These are the results:

(d) Correlation is highest intra-hemispherically (that is, when, say, the Northern Hemisphere’s land temperatures have placed near the top ranks, the NH sea-surface temperatures too have done the same) with a maximum of 98.6% (Southern Hemisphere, local Autumn) and a minimum of around 80% (Northern Hemisphere, local Winter).

(e) Same-season correlations are among the lowest, with a maximum of 74.5% (Spring) and a minimum of 68.8% (Summer).

(f) Among all the season-to-following-season correlations, the lowest values belong to the Oct_Dec-Jan_Mar periods (between 71% for Land, Northern Hemisphere and 80.5% for Land, Southern Emisphere).

(g) There is little, or perhaps even none, appreciable difference between Land and Sea-surface results

Conclusions and working hypotheses for the future will be discussed in next blog in the series.

Let’s have a look now at the graphs for yearly averages, ranked from #0 (coldest) to #157 (warmest) for the period 1850-2007. Source is once again the HadCRUT data.

We are looking for trends, so instead of simply taking the published average temperatures for the year, I have averaged the monthly ranking for each year taken into consideration. There is anyway no considerable difference between the results of the two approaches.

Figure 1 above shows the rankings for the whole period. Things to note:

(a) There is a clustering of warmer years during the past 20 years or so. This does suggest an overall warming. Taking the HadCRUT data for good (otherwise there would be no point examining them), it is also possible to say that the “warmest X years happened within the past Y years”.

(b) The steepest gradient IN TERMS OF RANKING is by far between the cold years around 1910 and the warm years around 1938.

(c) All the graphs end up with a “cap”

To investigate point (c), Figure 2 above shows the rankings for the past 10 years. Things to note:

(d) Only Land/Northern-Hemisphere gives any indication of continuous warming to date.

(e) Temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere have not been warming on a decadal scale.

I have been notoriously bad at making predictions but on the basis of figures 1 and 2 it is plausible that at least for now, and at least everywhere but on Land/Northern-Hemisphere, temperatures have reached a high and may not increase further.

The following contains a list of warmest/coldest year, by data set and by month, plus the ranking for 2007 (where #1=warmest).

Among the values to note :

(a) The year 2007 has seen the warmest month of January since 1850 for Land/Northern Hemisphere and Land/Global. It also ranked second warmest for Sea-surface/Northern Hemisphere in January and February.

(b) For Sea-surface/Southern Hemisphere, November 2007 has been the 29th warmest, and December 2007 the 34th warmest. That is, they were quite cool compared to the maximum values, achieved in both cases in 1997. The same can be said for Sea-surface/Global, ranked #20 in December 2007.

What the Bali agreements (i.e. a small adaptation fund, more CDM projects/policies, more negotiations on targets and timetables; technology transfer) are likely to mean for international efforts is simple to predict for a long-time observer. Great rhetorical efforts will continue with little effective action – other [than] more centralization of state power – in most countries […]

many agendas and several regions are likely to benefit from developments of less carbon intensive economies and lifestyles. The political consequences of such attempted developments may nevertheless be disastrous where economic growth or prosperity is undermined […]

Food, water, education and health are already more urgent ‘real’ global problems than climatic changes. Our primary (and more arduous) responsibility therefore is to current generations, though politics favors the future. People alive today are expected to pay for the implementation of an agenda too little concerned with conflict resolution but based on fear derived from computer model predictions generated and used by institutions that cannot be absolved of political motivations, however honorable.

For scientific reasons, all climate change policymakers and activists might familiarize themselves with the many voices – admittedly not proclaiming consensus – that are critical of the IPCC ‘scientific consensus’. More efforts needs to be devoted to observing climatic reality, understanding climate and only then, perhaps, on preparing for adaptation to real change. In the meantime, there are enough real problems to solve.

How many times have we been told that “weather” is not “climate”, that a heatwave or a cold front or heavy winds or hurricanes or the lack thereof, can say absolutely nothing about the state of the global climate?

Lo and behold, here comes the BBC’s John Hammond in the current “Monthly Outlook” for the UK:

The predominance of south or southwesterly winds kept temperatures at or above average in many parts in the early days of 2007. This theme looks set to continue for a greater part of the next month.
This comes on the back of recently released figures for 2007, which showed that on a global level 2007 was the seventh warmest on record since 1850.

Should it really be necessary to tell a meteorologist that if local above-average temperatures are due to “south/southwesterly winds” THEN the only way to connect the temperatures to global warming would be by demonstrating a link between those winds, and that warming?

Furthermore: the Hadley Centre has not published yet the final figures for 2007. Data so far show sea-surface temperatures for 2007 to be the 9th on record, globally (the southern oceans have actually recorded in December the coolest value in 13 years).

And so once more Global Warming has meant the publication of misleading pictures, with a wrong caption…why oh why does the mere mention of AGW force so many otherwise thoughtful and wise people to switch their brains off?

Clarifications and at least one correction are required about the pictures of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina, “from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006)”, on the first page of Bill McKibben’s “Warning on Warming” (NYRB, March 15, 2007).

If one could rely on photographs alone, those of Upsala could be the definitive, final, closing, incontrovertible evidence that something has warmed up during the XX century, at least at the location of the Upsala Glacier.

Pictures, however, are not everything, as any modern consumer must have learnt one way or another by now.

Do some little research about Upsala, in fact, and more than one doubt arises about the glacier’s changes having not been mostly caused by warming, global or local or otherwise.

They may be the result instead of the behavior of a large glacier when subjected to particular mechanical stresses.

That web site reports a picture from “Thinning and retreating of Glaciar Upsala, and an estimate of annual ablation changes in southern Patagonia“, by R. Naruse, P. Skvarca and Y. Takeuchi (Annals of Glaciology, Vol. 24, 1997).

In that paper, it is suggested that “considerable retreat due to calving may have resulted in reduction of longitudinal compressive stress exerted from bedrock rises and islands near the glacier front, causing a considerable decrease in the emergence flow.”

R. Naruse repeated similar considerations at the 2nd International Symposium on Arctic and Antarctic Issues, at Punta Arenas, Chile, in November 1998 (“Dynamic features of glaciers in Patagonia“).

“The satellite data, in synergy with field measurements, confirm the stability of the [Perito Moreno] glacier, showing only minor front fluctuations and indicating an approximately balanced mass budget since many years.”

Furthermore, they report the Pio XI glacier as having experienced a “net advance of about 10 km […] from 1945 to 1995“.

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Some revealing considerations should be made about Perito Moreno glacier indeed, the advancing glacier whose pictures have been used by Frank Capra in 1958 and by Al Gore in 2006 to demonstrate the retreat of glaciers due to global warming: but those will have to wait for a future article or letter.

For the time being, I am confident the above makes the main points clear:

(1) Most of the Upsala glacier has not melted.

(2) The Upsala glacier 1928-2004 pictures can only be seriously understood with an in-depth commentary of what is being shown, including “what lies beneath”.

And there are all the indications that the local characteristics of the terrain, rather than “Global Warming”, have had a major role in what has been happening.

======================

Given the reputation of the New York Review of Books then, I will be expecting a prompt publication of this letter and of all the necessary explanations.

Keep up the good work

Regards

Maurizio Morabito

UPDATE: The NYRB went only as far as admitting the caption was wrong (read it here)…

Science@NASA (Jan 14, 2008): “Posner explains: “Eleven years ago, during a similar ‘sea change’ between solar cycles, the polar wind spilled down almost all the way to the sun’s equator. But this time it is not. The polar wind is bottled up, confined to latitudes above 45 degrees”

Some of those who died in the heat may not have lived long if a heat wave had not occurred. Mortality often falls below baseline for several days after the end of a heat wave, and this has been interpreted as indicating that some of the people dying during the heat wave were already close to death.

Some of the excess deaths in the cold may have resulted from non-thermal seasonal factors such as winter diet, but deaths due to such factors are likely to be few.

Falls in temperature in winter are closely followed by increased mortality, with characteristic time courses for different causes of death.

The increases are of sufficient size to account for the overall increase in mortality in winter, suggesting that most excess winter deaths are due to relatively direct effects of cold on the population.“

In other words: Heat kills the already-dying. Cold kills.

As per the following diagrams: the slopes to the left (cooling) of the “black squares” (minimum mortality temperature bands) are steeper than to the right (warming).

The Magnitude (brightness) of observed explosions, after hovering for several decades around the 20 mark, has recently dropped to 15 (i.e. towards brighter supernovae).

Furthermore, the number of observed supernovae has been increasing at an exponential rate, again after many decades below 50 per year, to 95 in 1996 and a little less than 600 in 2007.

The fact that this is happening exactly as anthropogenic greenhouse-gases emissions are on the increase, cannot be just a coincidence. If this will not convince Governments about the importance of stopping CO2 emissions, nothing will!

Contrarily to what hastily announced at Bali and acritically repeated in news reports including on the BBC web site, the published HadCRUT data strongly support the notion that warming has stopped, globally.

The month of November 2007 has been:

In terms of global sea-surface temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 1994, and the coldest month since January 1997.

In terms of southern hemispheric sea-surface temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 1988, and the coldest month since January 1997.

Regarding northern hemispheric sea-surface temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 1996, and the 2nd coldest month since March 2001.

In terms of global land temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 2000, and the coldest month since January 2001.

In terms of southern hemispheric land temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 1989, and the 2nd coldest month since January 1993.

Regarding northern hemispheric land temperatures, the 2nd coldest November since 2000. and the 11th coldest month since January 2001.

Records broken and almost-broken in most sets, but on the cooling side…is that perhaps why there has been no indication of the above in news releases?